The Well-Tempered Chocolatier

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who are cut out for food service, and those who aren’t. I tried to be in the first category, but I know that I really belong in the second. I’ve worked at bakeries, pastry shops, restaurants, hotels, and chocolate shops. I tried them on for size, and I ended up liking chocolate the most.

As far as chocolate shops go, I’ve worked in a teeny tiny family-run business where everything was done by hand. I’ve also worked in a high-volume, high-end shop where, at the height of Christmas craziness, we produced 80,000 chocolates per week.

The family-run chocolate shop

I worked for a German family who worked from family recipes that dated back three generations. There was a bakery in the basement where I learned to make 25 L batches of dense German nut tortes, roll out 6 feet of puff pastry by hand, and make soup vats of caramel.

Note that caramel is also known as liquid napalm, as the two-inch scar on my right thumb will attest. If you are unfortunate enough to have it hit your skin, this is what will happen: your neurons will register that a liquid at 165 degrees Celsius has just hit your skin. A split second later, your brain will realize that in the time it took the first neurons to fire, said liquid has burned its way through the top five layers of your skin and is making its way to your flesh, and possibly your bone.

But I digress.

I didn’t like working in the basement bakery. It was hot and dusty with flour. I preferred working upstairs in the 6 foot square space that I shared with two co-workers, as we stirred and stirred and stirred vats of chocolate. Gym? Who needed a gym? I had the world’s best biceps, trained from hours on end of stirring stirring stirring.

We whispered sweet nothings to the beta crystals, coaxing them into being and giving us perfectly tempered chocolate. And then we would turn the chocolate into heart-shaped boxes, Easter bunnies clutching baskets of flowers, and happy face lollipops.

We dipped truffles by hand, and I can still hear the sound of the tap tap tap of the dipping forks on the edge of a bowl. My favourite days were molded chocolate days. We would make chocolate-shaped walnuts full of pistachio marzipan, square buttons full of coffee ganache, faceted jewels full of mint ganache…

In my last week there, I made a piano out of chocolate.

The high-volume shop

The high-volume shop glittered with machines. Two tempering machines kept dark and milk chocolate circulating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The enrobing machine brought to mind the chocolate episode of I Love Lucy. My co-workers were, quite honestly, the most efficient people I have ever worked with.

Here, the goal wasn’t about coaxing the chocolate into beta crystals. It was expected that they were, otherwise someone would whip them into shape. Here, the goal was to work clean and fast. And, the next time you did something, to work cleaner and faster. We were a well-oiled machine. We made bonbons, we cut them, we enrobed them. Lather, rinse, repeat.

We spent most of our time on the enrober, which coats the bonbons in a thin shell of tempered chocolate. There’s a small platform where you set the naked bonbons, and then they take a chocolate bath in the enrober. They emerge on the other end to get all kinds of custom decorations.

My favourite thing to do was to set the bonbons. The machine beeps at set intervals, and I would race myself to see how many bonbons I could place on the belt before it beeped. And then I would race around to the other end of the enrober to pick up the finished bonbons, and then run back to the other end to set some more. Meanwhile, two co-workers stood calmly in the middle, decorating the bonbons with what can only be described as zen.

It was like a game that you played with yourself, willing yourself to beat your old record.

Each bonbon got its own delicate decoration. None of them were simple. Many of them needed a cocoa butter transfer, which had to be applied in the 20 second window after the chocolate emerged from the enrober, but before it set. Some of them got a nut, placed at a very precise angle. Others got a sprinkle of sea salt, a drizzle of white chocolate. My least favourite required a single leaf of edible gold leaf. Gold leaf is notoriously static-y and likes to stick to itself. It’s like ketchup: you get none, or the entire bottle.

We also made molded chocolate caramels. Lots of them.

My kitchen, today

In the end, I’m just not cut out for food service. I’m not knocking it, I’m just saying that it doesn’t work for me. The 16-hour days, the (ahem) less-than-ideal pay…it just didn’t make sense. The thing with working in someone else’s chocolate shop is that they have a product line. Their customers expect those products every time that they visit the shop. Consequently, working as a chocolatier is one of the most routine jobs that I could have chosen. It also happens to be one of the most technical, which is why I was drawn to it – but I am easily bored, so routine doesn’t sit well with me.

So sure, I don’t make money playing around in my kitchen, but I can be creative with what I make, and make money elsewhere. If it’s delicious, then my friends and family get to benefit from my brilliance. And if it isn’t…well, I’ll probably eat it anyway.